Previous year were great for some of the web browsers and not so good for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.

Since it’s now 2009, let’s sum up all the market share reports and check final results.

Internet Explorer lost 7.32% of its market share
Firefox gained 4.37% of the market share
Safari increased its market share by 2.11%
Google Chrome went from 0 to 1.04%
Opera gained 0.09% of the market share
Despite “Dead” Netspace Navigator, it lost only 0.04% of its market share
Opera Mini increased its market share by 0.04%

Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

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Comments (14)

Well, this seems more of the hand-made Net Applications crappy stats. At least specify the source and the market target because “Browsers Market Share for the Year 2008” seems too conclusive and too global to be accurate.

Not sure why others are quoting them, but back in 2007 when I started to do this kind of reports, their data was more accurate.

By the way, they are working on their end now to increase share data accuracy in russia and some europe countries. As that’s pretty much the main reason why Opera has only 0.71 of the market share in NetApps.

Opera is not smaller than Firefox, and it’s not faster. More features? Sure, they’re better integrated, but it has way less features. And when I talk about never increasing, it’s because they’ve been there for YEARS, around the “just almost 1%”…

@ Andy

Firefox scores 55% on Norway, if I remember correctly. Or was it Finland? I forget.

Net Applications is not US only. It’s the largest survey of its kind and it’s very much global. No other survey comes close to the 140+ million unique visitors and so it’s the most accurate global measure that exists.

Opera is definitely growing more users, but unfortunately for them they’re not gaining any faster than the growth of the Web itself (more people coming online) so their market share is static.

Opera is smaller. Compare the English installers. And Opera can run comfortably on slow mobile phones, whereas this is impossible for Firefox. They are working on it, but the requirements will be much higher than Opera’s

Opera is faster in real-world usage. Chrome is faster than Opera again, but Opera is definitely much faster than Firefox when rendering most sites. Opera’s UI is faster than both Chrome and Firefox.

If you read the articles i linked you you will see why Opera is reported as standing still. Remember, Net Applications used to report Opera at 5%, and then edited it overnight to be 0.0something. The same happened again when Opera+Opera Mini were approaching 2%. They edited their stats and sent both back to 0.0something.

It is not the most accurate, as the link also shows. It claims that Chrome has more users than Opera despite the fact that Chrome had 10 million users while Opera had 30 according to both companies at the time.

Again, read the link. Net Applications is useless, their stats are dishonest, and they are actively manipulating their own stats and dumping Opera down on a regular basis when it starts going above 1%.